Two friends have linked to the Microsoft Songsmith promotional video, so I’ve watched it twice. There is a plot line about Miles, an ad man who must come up with a campaign for glow-in-the-dark towels. He learns about Songsmith and, at 2:50 into the video, is at a presentation meeting at work. The scene opens on Jim, giving a presentation by pointing at a whiteboard and citing data. He is so boring that he is cut-off mid-sentence by his Chinese boss, who then turns to Miles and asks, “What do you have for us?” He opens his laptop and sings a jingle about glow-in-the-dark towels. His boss and Jim show expressions that I think are supposed to represent awe, and then break into applause when Miles is done. We learn in the next scene that was “the best [ad] they ever had.”
Think about it. This video is a part of a promotional campaign for a product in which the main character is responsible for making a promotional campaign for a product. For that meeting scene to be filmed, there had to have been an actual meeting in which an actual guy pitched the idea, to his actual boss, of having a scene where a fictional guy pitches a jingle to his fictional boss, in which everybody is completely won over when the guy sings into his daughter’s sticker-covered laptop.
That can only make sense if the video is not parody, but documentary.